I swear sometimes 1960s tech still looks futuristic.

Excuse me, sir! Can you direct me to the naval base in Alameda? It's where they keep the nuclear wessels

TIL that there is a nuclear reactor that isn't powerful enough to power my pc. I don't know what which one it says more about, but it says something.

"So, what do you want to launch on this mission?" "A nuclear reactor with 93% enriched uranium." "Huh. That's pretty rich. How do you plan to cool that?" "Highly reactive alkali metals." "Hmm. Interesting choice. And your going to get it up there how?" "With a crap-ton of highly corrosive, hypergolic rocket fuel, of course!" "Solid choice. Hey...is that your car?" "Yeah! Just bought it. It's a Corvair!" "ARE YOU MAD?! THAT THING'S A DEATHTRAP!!!"

My father worked for Atomics International and worked on the SNAP 10A as a design engineer. He said it was an engineering marvel.

Scott I recently flew from Perth to Sydney, stayed a week and came back yesterday. On a couple of occasions I saw a group of pilots, all men, talking and as I walked past them I said, "Fly safe gentlemen." That is your influence on me.

I love all of those cool retro space animations. They were much cooler than the latest computer animation we have today.

7:35 Plasma wind tunnels? That brought me to interesting web pages.

6:36 Yep, and lighthouses used mercury to provide frictionless "bearings" for the lenses, back when.

My Dad worked at Aerojet General in Azusa, Ca. in the late 50's through the 60's. He worked on the Snap 8 project and I remember him talking about it using liquid NAK and highly pure hydrogen peroxide. I remember him talking about the danger using some of the chemicals used in the construction. I know He also worked on NERVA and the Mark 14 torpedo while at Aerojet General. Seeing your video brought back some fond memories of my late Father. Thank You.

I gotta say the AI upscaling on this archival footage looks *real* bad.

When you say "the (1960s) scientists weren't even done yet" I was honestly expeting you to tell us they were planning on using liquid fluoride as a coolent or some shit like that, lol.

Great job on the explanations here. As a nuclear guy, I'm always surprised at how many science content creators get just basic reactor stuff wrong. Yes, absolutely, nuclear geometry is VERY important in reactor design. Not only to achieve criticality, but also for safety and control. I find it interesting that they had hafnium in the fuel cladding. Hafnium is a big (BIG) neutron absorber and is often used in control rods to reduce neutron flux and "slow a reactor's roll" so to speak. Or shut it down by inserting all or a certain group of control rods into a core (aka SCRAM). Normally hafnium and zirconium are found together in nature, and to use zirconium in fuel cladding (Zircalloy, the most common type) the hafnium has to be processed out so it doesn't inhibit fission. Maybe they allowed some small amount of hafnium to act as a neutron poison? I'm not sure. It seems like with such a small mass of U-235, they wouldn't really want a poison. Then again, maybe just removing the reflectors wouldn't be enough to quickly shutdown this little core without a preexisting poison in the fuel cladding. I'd like to know more about this. All I remember from all of the materials stuff I had to study in school is that hafnium = bad in fuel cladding.

"plasma wind tunnel" just casually thrown out there

1:54 I can relate. What I find critical about myself is also less the mass and more the geometry!

Hastelloy is one of the nickel based superalloys like inconel

AI upscaling can be spooky sometimes

This isnt AI upscale, this is evidently AI downscale. My god, At First I thought I had done acid.

You do know, there is a fusion reactor in space already. It's been there for years...

A lot of people don't realize how pervasive the SNAPs were. Most people don't realize this, but when Neil Armstrong left the Lunar Module for the first time, he was actually going out to grab the plutonium rod for their SNAP and move it from one leg of the lander over into the SNAP to begin powering the Lunar Module.

For any space applications past Mars or in cold temperatures on Mars and the Moon, heat from the reactor is as valuable as the electricity.

IA image treatment is highly disturbing. Honestly, would have been FAR better to just put out a clean slideshow in there ....

13:00 Love the hand drawn "animations" they used to use.

1:30 Ah, the good old times, when you worked with beryllium with no face mask and putting the fuel rods using simple gloves...

What is going on with the faces and fingers in the clips after 2:00? Is there AI coloring going on here? It looks very odd.

I worked at the facility that probably refined the uranium and made the fuel rods. It was a DOE site near Cincinnati called FMPC (Feed Materials Production Center).

6:28 Love the architecture of the Vandenberg entry gate

Thanks so much for creating and sharing this informative video. Great job. Keep it up.

good video as always but the AI upscaling on the old footage looks absolutely awful

This tiny reactor is quite something! Thanks for sharing this with us!💛

Thank you for all the hard work in making these excellent videos.

I love these stories, Scott. Please never stop.

Love your history of space/rocketry videos. Well done!

Hastelloy is a nickel based superalloy. It was one of the first superalloys developed, primarily for use in jet turbine blades.

Thank you for ripping this story out of the darkness of history 😊

Thanks Scott, for pronouncing "niche" correctly.

Fascinating history indeed! Thanks, Scott! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

exceptional video. this was super interesting!

The research was not abandoned, just slowed waiting for a brighter future to emerge

Great video Scott. I don't know of anybody else who would enlighten us with topics of space interest like this that don't quite have the entertainment value some space fans look to see.

Interesting video, I lived through most all of this and don't recall much of it ever getting into the news. But then when NASA publically announced that they were going to launch a reactor, there were demonstrations.

Great video, Scott...👍

Scott, since you mentioned the Soviet spacecraft, maybe you can do a video on the one that crashed in Canada in the 70s and basically scattered its reactor core over the northern wilderness.

Hey Scott, thanks for this history episode. I really enjoy them. This gives me a chance to relate a story my Dad told me. He worked for the company that built the first ion engine that was flown into space. I don't remember that it went up with the Snap reactor. The company was Electro Optical Systems, EOS, in Pasadena California. The ion engine was built under a contract from MIT, or some university like that. Like you said, when the engine was in space and turned on for testing, the high voltage power supply arced and shorted out. The power supply was in some kind of sealed container that kept some of the air inside. Ground testing showed no problems because air is a good insulator at atmospheric pressure. In flight, the container leaked sir down to a pressure where the air ionized when the power supply was turned on Lesson learned; next engine had ports to bleed out the air. Twenty or so years ago I went online to search for any information on the engine. I think the Smithsonian had a copy of it. Plus, they had an experimental ion engine made by Dr. Robert Goddard. It seems that the concept for an ion engine has been around for a long time!

Very interesting as usual! Have you considered doing some videos looking at the development and use of RTGs in spaceflight?

I think the risk of unintentional contamination from leaking mercury coolant would easily be offset by higher efficiency in coal fired power plants since coal contains lead, mercury, uranium, etc. which were all released as part of the normal operation of the plants. My favorite rebuttal for anti-nuclear crazies is that they did nothing about coal plants, each or which put more radioactive contamination into the environment each year than all Western accidents did total over more than half a century of operations.

That was pretty interesting, thanks Scott.

Hey thanks for the info, more than I ever knew. I worked at SLC4 for Lockheed at the time and spent many months preparing for the launch. Mostly I worked the ground telemetry systems and the SNAP was different than any other program, the telemetry as I recall was PAM instead of the usual at that time which was FM/FM with commutators. Lots of overtime. Lots of different sensors on the pad to make sure nothing was leaking and we all wore radiation badges. I was just a kid so fun for me. Thanks.

Scott Manley: Notice how big the radiators have to be in space. Stanley Kubrick: Nope.

The upscaling/ai? on the old videos is really really bad. would have been better off leaving them as is.

Thermocouples or Thermopiles? From my memory Thermocouples are used for millivolt temp measurement while Thermopiles can be used to generate a usable power for low power devices. I guess with enough in series/parallel you could power anything?

"Launched into a high stable orbit for safety" vs "Soviets used reactors in low orbit for drag reasons" is a hilarious juxtaposition.

What great history! Thank you Scotty! Amazing science.

That is really great stuff THANKS.

Superb video Scott. I wish they select you for space mission

Great video as always scott. I'd like to add that hastelloy is an alloy of nickel and chromium (allong with some other stuff like iron and molybdenum). Fly safe

The 1960's (and, to a lesser degree, the pre-sixties) really was the craziest decade. I'm assuming that in the clip you first showed when talking about NaK, the guy is just casually shaking chunks of Sodium or Potassium metal out of that HUGE can. No gloves, no forced ventilation or fume hood, and who knows if he was wearing eyepro.

I believe that the alloy "Hastelloy" is a trademark for one of the inconel alloys.

I like how stable this old launch footage is compared to the shaky-wobble-fest we have have these days.

Great report.

3:00 : Hastelloy is a standard nickel-based superalloy, with chromium and molybdenum being the main alloying elements. It does not contain hafnium nor tungsten, as far as I'm aware.

The AI upscaling used in this made some of the people look like real horror monsters. Especially at around 6:10.

some of the attempts at ai upscaling in this video look absolutely terrifying idk what's going on with that

"and the coolant for the reactor... well, it's kinda cool"

9:14 Take that beautiful view of a huge diffusion vacuum pump on the left...

this episode is gold. at 14:22 was one of the several times i had to 'stop 'rewind and hear that agai n!!!. serious mad ideas from science / inventors playing. strewth, cheers. great show. i do have a rocket engine topic you probably can explain real quick . Rocket engines Push, How is the push connected the structure? and then maintain vectoring?

awesome video

Humans are despising a safe and reliable source of energy. Nuclear.

I have a copy of an AEC brochure regarding the SNAP program from the mid-‘60s.

this is a really interesting set of projects, very cutting edge for the 60s. seems like we've hardly made progress since then though I'm sure we're more capable now.

one more important thing about NaK, if it comes in contact with water, its EXTREMELY explosive, so please know what you are doing with it!

cheers,again !

The AI "enhanced" oldschoold footage looks way worse than it did originally. Great clip anyway !

Those packets in the shell of the cone sounded like a steering system. Maybe they were the problem. 🤔😁

Wow, that was interesting!

"Critical geometry" Yes! Scott gets it! I studied nuclear power both in college and the Navy, and hearing someone say, "Critical mass," makes me cringe almost as much as hearing someone say, "Knots per hour."

I see Egon Spengler had a role to play in this @2:57😁

I wouldn’t have wanted to be the bloke turning fuel rods on a lathe!

SNAP was developed at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, at the eastern end of Simi Valley CA. The same place where they did static tests of the early rocket engines. It wasn't the only sodium-cooled reactor. There was also the "Sodium Reactor Experiment," a prototype for commercial nuclear power plants. That reactor did have an accident that released radioactive steam into the air (something people claim is still contaminating the area - who knew steam could stick around that long?).

9:28 love how the jig shows a max speed 5mph! Like that was going to be the payload max speed! 😂

Video #2 of asking for a video on the Decadal Survey, Uranus orbiter mission, and the plutonium shortage

There are many different Hastelloys, but there is no Hafnium (some may contain W, like, Hast-C22, Hast-X and Hast-C276, but most are high in Moly). Hast-N was used in molten salt reactor in the 60s, which is mainly Ni-Mo(17%wt)-Cr(7% wt) with some si, al, c, fe. Hast-X is very popular today.

There's nothing like 1960s animation that brings back sweet memories of my childhood.

My father worked at this company, Atomics International, in Canoga Park, CA during this period. You can see the AI logo on some of the lab coats. It was a division of North American Aviation at the time and later merged with Rockwell to become North American Rockwell. I worked there as a summer intern for two summers in the late 70’s on my summer breaks from college, By coincidence occasionally getting to work with my dad in a professional capacity. It was a real highlight of my life.

They we bold and tried so many futuristic things back then. The Nerva engine for an example . thanks for sharing this story . Imagine if they had achieved 50% efficiency ? 25Kw could be of so much use for remote outpost . like the one being planned on Mars and Moon. Mercury vapor spinning turbines would have be so cool

its like in that one Werner von Brsun TV Program where he presents LEO and Lunar unfrastructure that is all nuclear powered

That section at 1:29 sure looks like one of the ISRU units from KSP -- wonder if that's what they used for the inspiration

"It'll stay up there in orbit for another 1000 years, giving us enough time to figure out how to dispose of it before it burns up in the atmosphere." -- sure, unless it'll be caught up in the Kessler syndrome.

Boiling mercury with a nuclear reactor. In space. Lovely.

Amaziing video

Love that 5 MPH sign.

A video about the SERT-2 ion thruster test in 1970 would be interesting.

The SNAP!(Rhythm Is A Dancer) music video is filmed at the Kennedy Space Centre Visitor Complex. Rockets and Techno, does it get any better?

Speaking of the Agena-Atlas rocket, Homemade Documentaries has released Gemini part 2, covering Gemini missions 6-12, along with the associated Agena missions. 2 hrs 43 minutes of wonderful NASA video and history.

Oh SNAP! Thanks, you've been a lovely audience. Tip your servers, try the veal!

Hastelloy is a nickel molybdenum alloy series. It is highly corrosion resistant (and essential for handling NaK alloy).

Fascinating!

I’d like to hear more about plasma wind tunnels. That was a new term to me.

With modern thermoelectrics and fuel that has already passed the hazard of launch, someone really should put this to good use even if it's just a heater for something going to deep space.

It's worth noting that RTG:s and other technologies that rely on natural decay are not considered nuclear reactors even if they use nuclear energy. To be a proper reactor, you have to utilize controlled neutron induced fission. I guess fusion would also count but they are a class of their own.